Ryan Kelln

Description

Hourface displays two movies inside an hourglass shape; one of Yoko singing "Fly Me To The Moon", the other of her daughter singing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star". Each pixel of the movies acts as a grain of sand, flowing between the two halves of the hourglass. The orientation of the hourglass can be controlled with a custom-made hourglass controller (we used a large wooden with the top half painted bright orange and the bottom half painted bright green) and a Logitech® QuickCam® Pro 9000 webcam. As you turn the hourglass it creates the sounds of the sand moving and adjusts the volume and position of the movie sounds (Yoko and her daughter singing) so that Yoko's singing comes from the direction corresponding to where her face is in the hourglass. The soundscape also changes based on the state of the hourglass and the input from the controller.

Media

This video gives a brief demonstration of version 1.0 of Hourface that was shown publicly at the AGGV. (Sadly the audio quality and sync are really bad.)

Development

These videos showing how the project evolved. (These are all mpeg2 videos. Right-click or command-click and then save.)

• April 21:

  First demo of 'pixel sand'
  First demo of 'face sand'

• April 29:

  Second demo of 'pixel sand'
  Second demo of 'face sand'

• April 30:

  Hourglass collision with 'pixel sand'
  Hourglass collision with 'face sand'

• May 1:

  Hourglass collision with piling sand

• June 7:

  First sand physics

  After researching granular flow and rigid body physics we now have something that starts to be useful for the final software.

• June 19:

  Improved sand and simple rotation

  Improved sand physics with simple rotation. Currently the sand only really works properly while the hourglass is upright, but at least the entire thing is rotating now.

• June 27:

  Sand with avalanching

  Now with "avalanches" and improved sandiness!

• June 29:

  Debugging example

  An example of what my "debugging" view of the hourglass looks like. This has the latest updates to rotation so that particles are (finally) being selected from the bottom up after rotation (although only in 4 directions).

• July 8:

  Sand physics beta

  The sand physics is finally all debugged and now just needs more tweaking to get the feel right. There are a few issues that I may address later if I have time but this is approximately what it will look like in the final installation.

• July 19:

  Rotation with rotating faces

  The faces now rotate and the pixel sand updates its color according to the rotated faces.

• July 23:

  Webcam rotation example

  First example of webcam computer vision detecting a mock hourglass and rotating the on-screen hourglass.

• July 30:

  Face movies

  First example of the faces being a movie rather than a still frame. The bad news? Framerate is between 1 and 2 fps. Ouch. Hopefully optimization and a faster machine will help. Alot.

Other Software and Thanks

• Processing (0148)

  • should work on 1.0+ but untested
  • many thanks to Ben Fry, Casey Reas and everyone at processing.org

• GSVideo

  • I have modified gsvideo although some of that code may now be included in the main version
  • many, many thanks to Andrés Colubri for all his help

• GStreamer for Java

  • used version 0.8, but there were bugs with this still
  • thanks to the forums for help

• JMyron

  • I have modified JMyron to run faster and only do what I need it to do
  • webcams are nasty, finicky, horrible things,... don't use them
  • this library is old and needs a lot of work

• Minim

  • many thanks to Damien for answering questions and bug fixes
  • I believe this is now part of Processing?

FAQ